A group of US Republican senators has called on the Department of Justice not to proceed with a plan to offer amnesty to researchers who come forward about previously undisclosed foreign funding, saying it would undercut efforts to protect “long-term national interests”.
First reported in January by
The
Wall Street Journal, the Justice Department’s programme would enable US academics to declare prior foreign financial assistance without fear of punishment as part of an effort to assess the scale of overseas funding.
The proposal comes as the Justice Department faces growing scrutiny of its China Initiative, a prosecutorial strategy initiated by the Trump administration to protect US intellectual capital. Critics say it has fuelled racial profiling of Chinese and Chinese-American scholars and harmed international academic collaboration.
Today’s post celebrates some of the highlights from TNOC writing in 2020. These contributions originating around the world were one or more of widely read, offering novel points of view, and/or somehow disruptive in a useful way. All 1000+ TNOC essays and roundtables are worthwhile reads, of course, but what follows will give you a taste of 2020’s key and diverse content. Which is not entirely about Covid, although it could have been.
Check out highlights from previous years: 2019, 2018,2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.2020 was difficult. Heartbreaking. I am sure everyone reading this has been battered by COVID. We all have lost people. So much of what we love about cities performing arts, restaurants, diverse communities, employment…life has been gutted. I hear us talk about nature coming back, and the value of parks, and yet…and yet there has been so much human devastation. Now that we have seen how our cities around the world truly function at their most vulnera